Kukla's Korner Hockey

Elliotte Friedman of CBC spoke with Senior Vice-President of Hockey Operations Mike Murphy today regarding the missed goal in San Jose last night.

The league views this under the prism of Rule 78.5 -- the world-famous "Intent to Blow." If the referee intends to blow his whistle to stop the play, that supersedes everything.

Here is what Murphy said:

"We have in a week two, three or four plays when the puck goes in the net as the whistle goes. What we look for is how strong a referee's signal is, how committed he is to his call.

"We don't want to undermine the referee... have people watching saying, 'See, see, see, they don't agree,' so before we put him on the headset we're looking to see how strong he is on his call."

The one thing that drives the NHL crazy about these things is people judging it in slow motion. You'd be better off sword-fighting a swarm of gnats, because technology makes that too simple, but Murphy and his co-workers do try to work through this stuff at real speed.

Comments

The league views this under the prism of Rule 78.5—the world-famous “Intent to Blow.” If the referee intends to blow his whistle to stop the play, that supersedes everything.

This is unbelievable. Actually, it’s not. The whole “Intent to Blow” needs to be revisited. Well, we knew that, but who gives a crap if Toronto is giving the appearance they disagree with the ref - all I want is the right call to be made.

You can’t expect a two refs covering 17,000sf of ice to catch everything, but when they don’t catch it, just try to make it as right as possible. Even if that means the ref has to admit he missed something.

The rules should be in place to make sure the right call is made and not that the referee, who is only human and thus prone to make errors, isn’t made to feel bad. Any referee worth his salt should be in favour of having the right call made, no matter what.

The one thing that drives the NHL crazy about these things is people judging it in slow motion.

And the one thing that drives NHL fans crazy is how utterly full of shit the NHL is.

Like I said in the other post, the ref made a definitive call that he shouldn’t have, and the NHL would rather go along with that and make up ignorant excuses than correct the situation and admit that its system of officiating is inadequate

Posted by
Hootinani
from the parade following Babs out of town on 11/06/13 at 03:05 PM ET

The Intent to Blow rule shouldn’t negate physics. Even quick actual whistles have disallowed some goals that were inevitably going to end up in the net no matter what anyone did. The Intent to Blow is a ridiculous rule that offers nothing but cover for a ref’s mistake.

The one thing that drives the NHL crazy about these things is people judging it in slow motion.

But that’s EXACTLY WHAT THE NHL IS DOING BY HAVING INSTANT REPLAY. If you don’t want people to judge anything in slow motion then get rid of instant replay and put it in the TV contracts that netorks aren’t allowed to present replays in slow motion. Hell, better yet, get rid of all the regular cameras and only put them on the refs helmets so that we, the viewers, can only see exactly what the refs see. Oh shit, that won’t work though. We need those cameras to be rigged to the refs’ eyelids so that if they blink the camera blinks. The point is that there are methods in place to make sure the right call is made, but the stupid NHL makes rules to prevent that from happening.

On top of that, I don’t think many people are gnashing their teeth about the call being missed on the ice. You’d have to be wilfully ignorant to not realize that Tyler Myers skates in front of the ref and blocks his view. The problem is that the guys in the war room -whose entire job it is to catch what the refs miss- didn’t catch what the refs missed.

The other thing to note is that, while there were nine games last night, at the time of the Sharks goal that wasn’t counted there was exactly one game still going on, which means that however many people were in the war room, and however they figure out who watches what games, nobody’s attention could have been divided by a need to cover several games.